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Cool comes from a highly personal synthesis of seeminglyincongruous elements.A recent example comes from comedian Corinne Fisher of the anti-slut-shaming podcast, Guys We F@#ked. Fisher held two seemingly unrelated models in her mind until they converged: "It was straddling the difference between my two goals: being the next Michael Moore and being the next Chelsea Handler. I knew something existed that would be in between these things." And then, shazam!: the GWF podcast suddenly fit her objective of "comedy with a purpose."

Joel Dinerstein is the author of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (Chicago 2017), American Cool (Prestel 2014), Coach: A Story of NY Cool (Rizzoli 2016), and Swinging the Machine (2003). I am a Professor of English and American Studies at Tulane University and I've taught a course on The History of Cool for 20 years. I hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas (Austin) and my research concerns the relationships of popular culture and modernity, race and American music, and literature and ethnicity.

American Cool was an acclaimed exhibit of 100 cool icons and photographs at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery that I co-curated with Frank Goodyear. My first book was an award-winning cultural history of big-band swing and industrialization, Swinging the Machine: Technology, Modernity, and African-American Culture.

I have served as a consultant on popular music for Putumayo Records, HBO's Boardwalk Empire, and the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities). I was the main architect of Tulane's academic website on New Orleans music and culture, Music Rising at Tulane, http://musicrising.tulane.edu.